The day dawned wet, and neither Dave nor I fancied a soaking at Morton Bagot. Fortunately a window in the weather opened at around lunchtime and I decided it was wide enough for a visit to Lower Bittell Reservoir.
This decent sized pool had been hosting a couple of good birds this winter. One, a Cetti's Warbler, would almost certainly be invisible. As it turned out it was also inaudible, early afternoon being not the best time of day to even hear one.
By contrast my other target, a Great White Egret, couldn't have been more obvious. It was standing on the bank of the Mill Shrub (a sub-section of the lake which is often better for birds than the rest of it).
It remained in more or less the same place until, inevitably, a fisherman arrived and flushed it. Even then it only went as far as some trees eighty metres away. Almost all of the 31 Tufted Ducks, but only one of the six Great Crested Grebes also haunted the Mill Shrub.
My walk over the hill to the dam gave me the opportunity to visit Alvechurch Fisheries, a series of pools on the opposite side of the dam wall. On Friday an Oystercatcher had taken refuge from an all-day deluge, on one of the rafts at Earlswood. I reasoned that there must be a chance that it was one of the pair which had nested at the fisheries last year, and sure enough it was back on its island sanctuary today.
All in all I was pretty pleased with the visit. A few Siskins and a single Redpoll were also present, and I counted 100 Jackdaws in the field at Lower Bittell adjacent to where I'd parked.
It has to be said that the Lower reservoir is a shadow of its former self. I didn't, for example, see a single species of duck other than Mallard and Tufted Duck. Too many fishermen I suppose.
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